Chapter 6: The Far Bank

SERAPHINA

They put me on Ilse's horse, behind her, and we rode north along the river for the whole of the next day.

I'd never been on a horse before. Ironmoor wolves run; horses are for trade and for the old. By noon I couldn't feel anything below my waist, and by the middle of the afternoon I'd stopped caring, because the silverroot had started to work.

It began as an itch somewhere behind my breastbone, where the bond had torn. Then it was more like a draught under a door, a thin cold thread of something that wasn't me. I kept going still to feel it, and every time I did, it went quiet again, like an animal that knows it's being watched.

"You feel her," Ilse said, without turning round.

"How did you know?"

"You stop breathing every time." She steered the horse round a fallen birch. "Don't chase her. She'll come when she's ready. Wolves are like cats that way."

"Mine never did anything I asked."

"Yours has been asleep for eleven years." Ilse's voice was dry. "Give her a day."

We stopped to water the horses at a shallow bend where the river spread wide over pale stones. Hakon and the two quiet men, whose names turned out to be Per and Anders, led the horses down to drink. Ilse sat on a rock, chewed a strip of dried meat, and offered me another.

I took it. Then I asked the question I'd been holding onto all day.

"What's on my wrist?"

She chewed for a while.

"It isn't my place to tell you," she said at last. "I'm not being difficult. There are rules about it, and they're older than me. Hakon will say the same."

"Then tell me something that isn't against the rules."

She almost smiled. "All right. Have you ever heard of the Eclipse wolves?"

I had. Everyone has, the way you've heard of dragons. Wolves born when the moon went dark, who could do things other wolves couldn't. Wolves who didn't need a pack.

"They're a story," I said.

"So everybody thinks." She brushed crumbs off her knee. "The last of them were supposed to have died out a hundred years ago. Hunted down. Every Alpha from here to the coast agreed they were too dangerous to leave alive." She glanced at me sideways. "So if a woman had one of them somewhere in her line, and any sense at all, she'd have done whatever it took to hide it. Even held her own daughter's arm to a hot iron."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't.

"That's all you get from me," Ilse said gently. "And I've already said too much."

Down at the water's edge, Hakon had gone very still.

He lifted his head like a dog catching a sound. Then he looked across the river, at the far bank where the pines came right down to the stones, and said quietly, "Down."

Ilse had me off the rock and flat behind it before I'd understood the word. Per and Anders led the horses back under the trees with their hands clamped over the animals' noses. The whole camp disappeared in about the time it takes to blink.

Across the water, riders came out of the forest.

Eight of them, then dogs, big grey hunting hounds with their noses to the shingle, then more riders. They wore dark green, and on the lead horse's saddlecloth was the black tower of Ironmoor.

I knew most of them. I'd served them supper.

Rowan was near the front, bare-armed in the cold, because his coat was lying torn at the top of a ravine twenty miles upstream. Tam rode behind him. And behind Tam...

Kael.

He looked terrible. That was my first thought, and I hated that it was my first thought. Grey under the eyes, jaw dark with stubble, sitting his horse like a man who'd been in the saddle since before dawn. He wasn't watching the water. He was watching the trees on our side, one stretch after another, slowly, the way you'd search a crowd for a single face.

They're looking for you, said the cold voice, somewhere deep in my head. It sounded almost amused.

To drag me back, I thought. Or to finish it.

The river between us was forty yards wide and waist deep. The wind was blowing from them to us. That was the only reason the dogs hadn't already gone wild.

Then the wind turned.

It wasn't much. A shift, a cold breath sliding down off the hills behind us and out over the water. I felt it lift the hair off my neck.

On the far bank, one of the hounds threw up its head and bayed.

And Kael went still in the saddle, exactly the way I'd been going still all afternoon, reaching for my wolf. As if he'd felt something too. Something thin and torn, stretched across forty yards of cold water.

His head turned. Slowly. Straight towards our rock.

Ilse's hand closed over my mouth.

Kael swung down from his horse. He didn't call to the others. He didn't say a word. He walked to the river's edge, and without taking his eyes off the place where I was hiding, he stepped into the water.